After Hours is a romance column: sensual, non-explicit fiction for grown-up readers. All characters are invented adults; any resemblance to real persons is coincidental.
Vera and Thomas, part five.
The letter from Stockholm came on a Tuesday, in a long cream envelope with a royal crown printed in the corner, and Vera left it unopened on her counter beside the lemon for most of a day, the way she sometimes left a damaged manuscript under weights overnight before deciding what it needed. She knew what it said. She had applied in the spring, in another life, before a man on a bench in the Whispering Gallery had asked whether she was the one who’d answered.
When she finally slit it open with a bone folder, it said yes: six months, beginning in February, conserving a collection of eighteenth-century Swedish letters that had survived a fire and very nearly not survived the people who rescued them. It was the kind of work she had wanted since she was twenty-five, and she read the offer three times standing up, and then sat down on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinet and read it a fourth time.
On Thursday she texted Thomas. “Saturday. Bedford Park stop on the 4, ten o’clock. I’m taking you somewhere warm.” He wrote back within a minute: “In November? I’ll bring the supplies.”
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